Pale Fire and London Fog - the mystery of Alexander Litvinenko

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The stench of the Bush family runs strong with this one, obi-wan.

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Pale Fire and London Fog: Illuminating Outliers in the Death of Alexander Litvinenko

by Chris Floyd
I. The Baron and the Billionaire

Everyone knows that Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radiation poisoning in London last month. But beyond that bare fact, almost nothing is clear about the case. The truth has disappeared, probably forever, into the shadowlands – that murky confluence of crime, violence, money and politics where so much of the real business of the world is conducted. However, an examination of some of the curiously overlooked aspects of the affair might send at least a few shafts of light into the cloud of unknowing that has enveloped Litvinenko's death.

Of course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing the situation is the fact that almost everything we knew about the case for weeks was spoonfed to the media by the most elite PR operation in Britain. Almost from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared behind a phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence. To handle – and generate – the publicity surrounding the incident, Berezovsky called on his old friend, Baron Bell of Belgravia, who, back when he was just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private propaganda chief for Margaret Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The baron has also flacked for disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush Administration to eviscerate Iraq.

(Speaking of the CPA, UK investigators now say they've found traces of Polonium 201, the radioactive isotope believed to have killed Litvinenko, in the London offices of Erinys, a private security company. As I noted in CounterPunch back in December 2003, Bush's CPA gave Erinys' Iraqi branch – formed as a joint venture with business cronies and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi – $40 million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has grown into a much larger stashn, not to mention an armed force of 16,000 men – something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in those palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is also active in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a whole tangled nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere else.)

The leaping lord's PR shop has also represented Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed poisoning laid at the Kremlin's door. Yet another client was former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose "miraculous" 1996 election victory – in the face of single-digit approval ratings – was engineered by a small group of oligarchs who were later given carte blanche to plunder Russia's state-owned enterprises and vast natural resources for private profit. The acknowledged leader of this clique – which had muscled its way to riches and power in the brutal, Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the Yeltsin years – was of course a certain Boris Berezovsky.

As one of the prime vetters of political aspirants in the Yeltsin court, Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure but presumably biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But Putin had a clique of his own, based in the security organs – and soon the oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad, where they'd stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky, charged with embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous digs in London and environs, there to become Putin's most ferociously outspoken critic. He also found new friends in high places – including Neil Bush, George W.'s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the backers of Neil's "educational software" company, which peddles a dumbed-down "interactive teaching" system called COW to public school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/floyd/floyd43.html

[Hugh R]

The whole thing to me is messy. Radiation is way too easy to trace, as has been seen on TV. I heard somewhere that Polonium 210 is not that hard to obtain. I vaguely remember hearing that its a component of some anti-static brush used in wet photography, commercially available at photo shops. Not saying that Russia isn't dirty on this, just that if you want to kill someone, there are lots of less traceable ways to do it. Potassium cyanide is very easy to obtain, and easy to get through security and customs, so are lots of biological toxins.

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Originally posted by Hugh R
The whole thing to me is messy. Radiation is way too easy to trace, as has been seen on TV. I heard somewhere that Polonium 210 is not that hard to obtain. I vaguely remember hearing that its a component of some anti-static brush used in wet photography, commercially available at photo shops. Not saying that Russia isn't dirty on this, just that if you want to kill someone, there are lots of less traceable ways to do it. Potassium cyanide is very easy to obtain, and easy to get through security and customs, so are lots of biological toxins.

There are lots of radiation detections systems around, and have been long before 9-11.

I find the Bush family connections to this the most interesting facts. This family has been dirty for a long time.